What I’ve Learned

It oughta be a bumper sticker: I wasn’t born at TEXASMONTHLY, but I got here as fast as I could. I first happened upon the magazine as a graduate student in the late eighties, and I was knocked out by its execution of journalism in what was, to me, the ideal form: narrative nonfiction, no shorter but no longer than necessary, filled with gripping detail and accompanied by photography and illustration that was every bit as journalistic as the writing. Beyond that there was a sense of fun—ample amounts of wit and nerve and an ability to tweak the self-important and the unself-aware in a way that didn’t seem mean. And a sense of purpose, a responsibility to something larger than the commercial imperative. Knowledge of Texas, and devotion (not blind) to Texas, and kinship with Texans infused every page.

What sealed the deal was the November 1989 issue. I picked it up in the office of a colleague at a magazine in New York. She’d worked for TEXASMONTHLY back in the day, and she had old copies strewn about, including one that contained a profile of Bill Moyers (“The Mythic Rise of Billy Don Moyers”), written by some woman I’d never heard of named Mimi Swartz. Moyers I had heard of, but even if he had been unknown to me, I would have been sucked in by his portrayal on the cover as a shirtless hero of yore, ripped from Edith Hamilton’s Mythology or maybe a romance novel, his sword raised to the heavens. Mimi’s story was perfect: ambitious and confident and tart and honest, neither a puff piece nor a hatchet job—the last word you’d ever have to read on the subject. As soon as I put it down, I wrote a letter to the editor, Greg Curtis, offering to sweep the floor, anything to get me in the door.

All of that seems like only yesterday, but it is, in fact, exactly eighteen years since Greg invited that persistent (but charming?) kid to apply for a slot on the masthead vacated by senior managing editor and new mama Katy Flato. I was an unlikely hire. In my clumsily trimmed Vandyke, tortoiseshell glasses, and three-piece suit, I looked more like a rabbinical student than a star journalist in the making, but somehow I limped across the line. And there I remained, just as implausibly, until August 21, 2009, my last day at TEXASMONTHLY. (I have since moved on to the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit public media organization, where I’m CEO and editor in chief.) The final tally: thirteen months as a senior editor, seven and a half years as deputy editor, just over eight years as editor, and just under one year as president and editor in chief.

I was 25 when I arrived at TEXASMONTHLY, so it’s fair to say I grew up here. I met my wife in the hallway outside my office. Both my children were born while I was on staff, and they spent many weekend days toddling around the place, snatching treats from senior editor Anne Dingus’s candy bowl and pestering “Uncle Levy,” as they came to call TEXASMONTHLY’s founder, Mike Levy. (There was that one time my daughter called him “Uncle Baldy” to his face, but that’s another story.) Early on it became difficult to distinguish work from home, colleagues from family—that was the culture Mike created. Eventually I gave in to the blurring of the line, joining countless others who’d long ago done the same. No doubt that’s why it was so heart-wrenching to leave.

But leave I did, grateful to take with me fond memories of the place, as well as many lessons learned, beginning with one I’ve ignored in the previous four paragraphs.

It’s not about us; it’s about them. People who read this magazine care about Texas. Except in the rarest instances, they don’t care about TEXASMONTHLY writers. Personal essays have always been part of the magazine’s mix, of course, but we’ve had the greatest success when our writers are the vehicles to tell other people’s stories, not their own. For as long as I can remember, we’ve discouraged writers from “inserting” themselves where they don’t belong. The magazine does right by its readers by remembering that egos should be kept in check.

Failure is an option. Too often the decisions that editors make are driven by fear. The perilous state of things has made it nearly impossible to take chances, to have grand ambitions, because no one in a tenuous situation—that would be every editor working today—can afford to belly flop. I’ve come to believe the opposite should be true: You need to be given permission to fail, because (1) you’re more willing to try new things that could turn out to be the next big things, and (2) in failure you learn. During my first twelve months as editor of TEXASMONTHLY, I made a point of going in as different a direction as possible in terms of subject matter, length of stories, and art direction. Very few decisions worked out as I’d hoped, but at least I wasn’t scared of my shadow. And I got better at my job as a result. By the time we published our Lance Armstrong cover, in July 2001, something had clicked. Had I been unable to experiment and fail, it would have taken much longer.

Class, not mass. The most important thing that an editor of a magazine can do is know his audience. All decisions should be made with the typical reader in mind; all actions should be taken with a goal of amusing, entertaining, and enlightening that person. You might wish to have a different audience, but there’s very little you can do about it—certainly not overnight. I quickly came to understand, for instance, that even though I thought it would be fun to have an audience of postgraduate-school hipsters, TEXASMONTHLY readers tended to be middle-aged. So those long-threatened plans to put